Friday, 29 July 2011

From my own past experience of using several web hosts to create my own website, I have come up with a list of important things which need to be considered when choosing a web host.

One of the first web hosts I used is Yahoo! Geocities. Unfortunately Geocities got shut down and my website no longer exists. I have created websites on other web hosts before, but I no longer have access to them as I haven’t used them in a long time due to being very busy with life.

Anyway, the reason I chose Yahoo! Geocities a long time ago is because it was free and it was fairly easy to make a website using Geocities. However after some time had passed I noticed a lot of problems with Yahoo! Geocities. Since I had a free account, my website had limited bandwidth. I only had some pictures of natural sceneries and flowers and animals on my website, and yet this small website frequently ran out of bandwidth, despite not having much visitors.

So I realized that storage space, bandwidth and stability/reliability in the web hosting service are the most vital things that need to be considered.

There are web hosts out there that that provide unlimited storage space, bandwidth and are fairly reliable. Hence I made websites on those types of web hosting services.

Some other important things which need to be considered are:

Speed and ease of access to the websites: We should choose web hosts which are reliable and have good speed, and does not run out of bandwidth.

Domain name: Choose a domain name according to one’s liking. There are web hosts that provide free domains

Emails: If you want new email addresses for the website, then the email feature should be considered.

Designing: It is convenient to choose web hosts which provide easy templates for making websites and do not require users to use complicated software to create and maintain their website.

Advertisements: The problem with most free web hosts is that they have a lot of advertisements or popups. Look for a web host that has either very minimum advertisement, or has no advertisement. Usually the best solution is to use a web host that provides good service with no advertisements, and only requires a small and affordable amount of monthly fees.

The features mentioned above are only among the important things. There are also other features that others may require from their web hosts which I haven’t written about, as they don’t have much relevance to me.